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10/02/2005:

"Colin MacCabe: Why I'm tearing up my Labour party card"

Dear Tony,
I'm writing to you as the leader of the party from which I am now resigning. I joined the Labour party in 1964 but this week is the first time I have felt ashamed of my membership. You will say it was an accident that two men were viciously bundled from the conference hall on Wednesday. But then you lie as you breathe. It is impossible that you do not know that when you took power as Labour leader you were determined to stamp out all public dissent and discussion within the party. It is impossible, in a more recent time frame, that you did not know and approve of the decision that there would be no debate on Iraq.

Even as I write this phrase, its absurdity, its grotesqueness hits me again. No debate on Iraq, no debate on the most important foreign policy issue that has confronted Britain since World War Two. No debate on Iraq, which has brought such a fear of violence to London. No debate on Iraq - on the national disaster with which the names of Guantanamo and Britain will be linked in infamy for our generation and probably beyond.

It is unthinkable that the Labour party could not debate the Iraqi war. But, of course, it is equally unthinkable that it could. For the situation there is so dire, the peril in which you have placed the nation is so acute that if even the smallest murmurs of evidence and argument were to be heard they would soon become a gale that would sweep you from office. It was telling that you did not even dare to speak to the old geezer they roughed up. But you had only to take one look at Walter Wolfgang and you could see Old Labour incarnate. An Old Labour that believed in swaying democratic opinion by fact and reason. An Old Labour that believed in debate. Given 60 seconds in front of the television cameras with Wolfgang and you'd have been mincemeat. You presided over a government which suborned its security services to provide false headlines for you to mislead the Commons into voting for the war. Worse, you ignored every lesson of our last imperial disaster in Mesopotamia - a campaign which became a byword for our soldiers being slaughtered to satisfy the vanity of politicians.
observor.guardian.co.uk

ouch.